This week’s ABC News debate was the straw which broke the camel’s back. For forty five minutes George Stephanopoulos grilled Senator Obama about every irrelevant issue he kind find – be it about Rev. Wright, Obama’s “bitter” comments, and about his “associations” with the Weather Underground. And just for good measure, let’s talk about Sen. Clinton’s “Sniper Fire” Bosnia flap. Think about that – you have two hours to ask (potentially) the next President of the United States anything you want about what they plan to do while in office, and that’s what you ask about? ABC News protests that all the other important issues have already been discussed in the past 20 debates. Think harder, George - 10% of this country is on food stamps, gender and racial injustices abound, and you really think you’ve covered all the issues with any justice?

I could go into all the other issues which haven’t been addressed – or the ones which have only been explored superficially – but what’s the point, this is the symptom of a larger problem in the media and unless we explore the motivation behind such behavior we will never really get to the root of the problem. The media cannot, even to save its own life (or reputation), actually explore in depth any issue of real political significance.

There was a time that I believed it was simply a matter of the media being afraid to take on tough political issues out of fear of alienating a certain segment of its viewing population. It was about playing it safe. But then I realized, wait - I’m offended all the time at what I see. And yet, nobody cares what I think, and millions of Americans are offended every day by media double standards, generally in favor of Republicans. And yet we still watch, because in the desert of American media, you drink whatever they give you because there isn’t really a choice.

I started to understand the nature of the problem a couple of years ago while listening to a panel discuss American journalism and the Middle East at UCLA. The question of the day – why is the media so terrible at understanding the region? Most experts on the panel agreed that, increasingly, media organizations refuse to invest in Arabic speaking journalists on the ground who can provide unfiltered accounts of what’s happening and the sentiments of the region. The reason? It’s expensive. Rather than spending millions a year to really understand a story, budget conscious corporations spend a few hundred thousand a year on human leeches, otherwise known as pundits. Thus, questionable stories like the “mobile WMD labs” being perpetrated by fake informants like “Curveball” in Iraq have no real scrutiny and the administration can peddle lies more easily. These pundits come on television and deliver their spin, claiming experience because they’ve spent some time in the military or work at a D.C. – based thinktank, and all of a sudden we understand Lebanon. Policy and public open are formed in such ways. Issues get discussed without being explored, and agendas and priorities are advanced without respect to sound policy advice. When you look at how little the media invests in fact-finding, it’s no wonder that the media is full of Paris Hilton-style stories. It makes millions, and costs very little, even though it’s of absolutely no relevance to the American people. Our priorities become what the media focuses lavishes its attention on and elects to spotlight in a 24/7 cable orgy.

Returning to American politics – is it any wonder that the media focuses on Rev. Wright, “Bittergate,” and the Weather Underground? Every pundit can come on television and manage to contribute something, however stale, to a five minute panel discussion on those topics. But if you asked a pundit – well, what exactly does a Universal Healthcare “mandate” entail, or to compare plans on solving the mortgage crisis, you would hear some flubbering and then silence. Pundits are paid to spin, not to think or help us think. The extent of their knowledge comes in the form of email lists telling them the day’s talking points, and any other spin they managed to hear on the air. Throw in a second blowhard and in the perverse world of media logic, two spins equal balance, even though all that manages to come out of the discussion is each side self-reinforcing their own preconceived notions about an issue or a candidate. Policy doesn’t always have to be so polarizing, particularly on issues like Global Warming.

This is why nothing changes in America – because it’s cheaper for the media to pay pundits than for the media to pay people who actually know what they’re talking about to come on the air, do background research, or take the time to think critically and objectively about a policy issue. The media often “raises questions” instead of spending any time to find us answers – a reason why for several days FOX News ran with a story that Obama was raised in a Madrassa. How about asking around – it’s not like all his friends and teachers are dead. Instead, the mead outsources political controversies to campaigns, expects each side to come on the air with their own research and rebut the false claims of the other side either through pundit or surrogate. If the other side fails to do so, millions of viewers will just have to live with believing complete BS about a particular topic. What’s worse, by portraying the issue in a one on one pundit-war, it gives the false impression of equally validity on both sides. The truth has nothing to do with the news.

The media is probably the only business whose profits go up while the quality of its product goes down, but that’s the bottom line.. It should be outrageous that the conditions at Walter Reed Army hospital have still not improved, but it’s not. It should be outrageous that millions of Americans lack health insurance and millions more die with health insurance because conditions aren’t covered as a pre-existing condition – but it’s not. It should be outrageous that a country that could do so much while spending so little in a continent like Africa – does relatively nothing and in many cases foments and arms the very wars which cause so much regional instability. While Americans suffer and die, at home and abroad, we worry about Pastor-gate, and Bitter-gate. And that is why nothing ever changes – we are told what to be outraged about, and it wasn’t really all that important to begin with.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” If we lived in President Bush’s world, those fateful words would be used to justify the Iraq war in the name of freedom. But Jefferson was really talking about ensuring that rulers feared their citizens. Jefferson wrote in that same breath, “what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?” Our nation has always fundamentally been based upon speaking truth to power. We are a nation whose been torn by injustices which threaten the nature of our ideals. Despite this struggle, the greatness of those ideals sustain a hope that we can live up to the values which inform our politics.

But in the last seven years, the leadership in Washington sacrificed our national integrity in the name of national security, and got nothing for the bargain. The Iraq war, without question, was built on a lie. A shameless, embarrassing, public lie which has shattered America’s reputation around the world and struck at the heart of our national identity. When that lie reached such a critical mass, the very casualties which underscored its recklessness were perverted to justify silencing its critics. But like all organisms, that lie had to be fed more lies to sustain itself. And now we are told that if violence decreases to the point it was before we invaded, victory is at hand. And if that fails, if we never leave, we never lose. This lie has been quarantined to Republicans and the Bush Administration to sustain the belief that there are real options in a two-party system, but the reality is that the war is funded, and was authorized by, many in the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party. The sins of this war are greater than one man – an unpleasant reality though it may be.

On Tuesday we face a crucial test of what direction we go as a nation into the future. For me, it has always been about this war. We must choose between a candidate which feels the war was poorly executed, and one that feels it was poorly conceived. And make no mistake, there is a lifetime of difference between those two ideas. The immorality of this war has never been about logistics – the troop counts or De-Ba’athification policies. It has been about the notion of pre-emptive, unilateral war as a legitimate foreign policy tool of a nation which calls itself a peace-loving Democracy. This is what it means to be “right on day one.” It’s not about who has a plan to get us out in 17 months, and who can get us out in 16 months. Who intends to leave permanent bases, and who does not. It is about writing into history books the great failure of this policy, and all those enablers who either conceived, authorized, or justified the greatest foreign policy mistake in our nation’s history.

But my somber idealism is by no means universal. For others, this election is about Barack Obama as an inspiration and transformative political figure. For one reason or another, the international , biracial, and multicultural story of Barack Obama somehow embodies our own lives. People personify overcoming obstacles in their own life through Obama’s success in this election. And they believe that with Obama as President, the world will once again see in our great nation the idealism of the American Dream - that the descendent of a Kenyan immigrant of mixed religious and cultural heritage, can rise to become the most powerful person in the nation – not by waging a campaign of fear, but of hope.

And yet, throughout it all, we have been dogged by the hopeless pragmatists who warn us about “setting our sights just a little too high.” With every major poll showing a narrow advantage to Sen. Clinton going into Super Tuesday, why should we have such hope and passion pinned on a Junior Senator who has spent so little time in Washington? Can we survive the disappointment, or unify behind the alternative, if we so persistently demand the purity of our convictions?

But how far we’ve come to stand here today. Like most Progressives, I had become so cynical and skeptical about our system that I could no longer trust the foundations of our institutions. But Barack Obama gave me a sense that real change is in part a function of what promises we demand our government keep. This is the real meaning of the Audacity of Hope. It is not naïve, but an unrelenting ambition to create a world filled with the sense of justice we were all educated to believe should exist. Pragmatism did not land a man on the moon, and it did not write a Declaration of Independence filled with proclamations of happiness in a world that knew so little of it. Our hopes and aspirations are the limits of our success and the foundation upon which all our society is built. May those hopes be as strong as our hands and hearts can accomplish, because the urgency of the moment demands that we not squander an opportunity that so many before us have worked to create.

I hope every single one of my readers votes on Feb 5th, and votes your conscience. And while alone we are dissenters, together we are a movement, whose symbol is Barack Obama.

Fired up and Ready to Go,
Steven Guess

The Washington Post is reporting that a senior Blackwater manager overseeing 34 people earns earns more than 2x what General Patreus earns, at $180,000 a year.

The National Review is urging its readers to consider General Peter Pace for a Senate run in Virginia.

With newspapers declaring the President of Iran evil, and the President subtly suggesting that airstrikes may be a possibility in Iran during a private videoconferences with the US ambassador to Iraq, prominant neoconservative Nomran Podhertz has released a new book suggested that President Bush will try to strike Iran before he leaves office.

“The court let stand a New York court ruling upholding a state law that forces religious-based social service agencies to subsidize contraceptives as part of prescription drug coverage they offer employees.”

Barack Obama is reported to have raised $20 million dollars in the third quarter of 2007. That puts him on part with his chief rival, Hillary Clinton. He also reports 93,000 new donors over the previous reporting period.

Mitt Romney says he misspoke when he said that his sons chose his Presidential campaign over serving in the military for Iraq. RIGHT.

After crashing more than 1000 points in a week, recovering a little, and falling another 200-300 points, Economists say the last peg holding up the Bush Presidency could be about to fall. While it’s too early to spell doom for the economy, uncertainty often is its own self fulfilling prophecy.

Rudy Guiliani says he misspoke when he said he spent more time at ground zero than the rescue workers after 9/11. RIGHT.

The President’s top political strategist Karl Rove has resigned to, and here’s a shocker, help his family. I don’t for a second believe it’s about his family 1) because his family was there the other seven years of the Bush Presidency and the last 14 years he’s worked with Bush 2) He has plenty of money from his previous business to pay legal bills.

My guess is it’s an attempt to outwit the Democrats in some way and restart the Bush Presidency before it has too much radioactivity surrounding it, or the Democrats get too close in pinning something on him.

After a disappointing showing in the Iowa Republican Straw Poll, Republican candidate for President Tommy Thompson has officially dropped out of the race. The real question now is: whose next?

Fred Thompson, GOP candidate for President, got a major upgrade on his website today. The look is pretty crisp and new. Listening to Fred Thompson’s opening speech was interesting, as he cojently laid out the Republican argument for how government ought to be run. His theoretical look at the issues neglected a lot of key liberal arguments, but it was nonetheless better than anything Bushy could come up with. He looks rather sick, however, a reminder that this is a man how has cancer and isn’t very young.

We apologize for the inconvenience, but updates will resume on Thursday.

Britain has asked the United States to release five inmates being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The US has said it will “study the request very carefully.”

News outlets are hyperventilating over the fact that Rudy Guiliani’s daughter, Caroline, is liberal and supports Barack Obama’s bid for the Presidency.

Republican Presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo made the stunning promise that he would bomb Mecca if America is hit by a terrorist attack again.

If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina,” the GOP presidential candidate said. “That is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do. If I am wrong fine, tell me, and I would be happy to do something else. But you had better find a deterrent or you will find an attack. There is no other way around it. There have to be negative consequences for the actions they take. That’s the most negative I can think of.

Gee, that will go over really well among the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, don’t you think? Yup, I can definitely see world peace coming out of that decision.

Barack Obama has suggested that a more aggressive intervention into Pakistan may be warranted in his latest foreign policy speech, aimed at countering the Clinton campaign’s assertion that he is naive on US foreign policy:

I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will….

Just because the President misrepresents our enemies does not mean we do not have them. The terrorists are at war with us. The threat is from violent extremists who are a small minority of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, but the threat is real. They distort Islam. They kill man, woman and child; Christian and Hindu, Jew and Muslim. They seek to create a repressive caliphate. To defeat this enemy, we must understand who we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for…

The President would have us believe that every bomb in Baghdad is part of al Qaeda’s war against us, not an Iraqi civil war. He elevates al Qaeda in Iraq – which didn’t exist before our invasion – and overlooks the people who hit us on 9/11, who are training new recruits in Pakistan. He lumps together groups with very different goals: al Qaeda and Iran, Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents. He confuses our mission…

By refusing to end the war in Iraq, President Bush is giving the terrorists what they really want, and what the Congress voted to give them in 2002: a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

When I am President, we will wage the war that has to be won, with a comprehensive strategy with five elements: getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan; developing the capabilities and partnerships we need to take out the terrorists and the world’s most deadly weapons; engaging the world to dry up support for terror and extremism; restoring our values; and securing a more resilient homeland

Andrew Sullivan calls it Presidential because it’s more extreme than what Cheney and Bush are willing to do. He writes:

Outflanking Bush-Cheney with a serious, aggressive, intelligent campaign against Islamist terror? It’s what the country wants. And it seems to be what Obama is offering. He manages to decouple the war in Iraq from the broader war on Islamist terror

Ron Brownstein from the LA Times and President Bush’s decision to block healthcare for children through the nationally funded SCHIP program:

Does president Bush really believe what he’s saying about the effort from congressional Democrats and some leading Senate Republicans to provide health coverage for millions of uninsured children? He’s portraying it as the first step on a slippery slope toward “government-run healthcare,” as if senior senators in both parties were conspiring with Michael Moore to import Cuban doctors to inoculate and indoctrinate American children.

In fact, Congress is moving responsibly to remove a blot on the nation: the 8 million children without health insurance. It is doing so by expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, a state-federal partnership that the Republican Congress and President Clinton created in 1997 to cover kids in working-poor families. Final votes on the House and Senate floors could come this week.

Bush, seemingly determined to provoke every possible confrontation with congressional Democrats, has pledged to veto the bills. And with the GOP congressional leadership, he is fighting the proposals with a swarm of misleading and hypocritical arguments.

Bush complains that expanding the program costs too much. But cost was no object when Bush and congressional Republicans sought to court seniors by creating the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003.

Whoopie Goldberg is replacing Rosie O’Donnell on “The View,” maintaining a liberal seat on the panel.

Following Lowe’s decision to drop the O’Reilly factor, Home Depot will no longer advertise on his program following his anti-global warming statements. Home Depot told customers that the decision was apart of their companies larger effort to be a “Green Friendly” company.

In 2003, the monthly death toll was averaging 48.6 deaths per month. According to 2007 numbers, the current average is 92.9 deaths per month. Despite this, the government continues to tell us the surge is working and violence is down.

“It’s a bad thing for the Journal and American journalism that the Bancroft family could not resist Rupert Murdoch’s generous offer,” former DowJones director Jim Ottoway Jr told reporters. Another board member, Leslie Hill, quite in protest of the move.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield defended himself against charges his office orchestrated a cover-up of Army Ranger Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire, telling House Committee members that ordering a cover up is not something he would do and “I know that I would not engage in a cover up.”

Details continue to emerge of a far more expansive Domestic Spying program than previously thought. The Washington Post reports that the NSA is part of a larger effort, with the Terrorist Surveillance Program just being one component within a single executive order in 2001. The disclosure comes as an attempt to defend the Attorney General from charges that he committed perjury by saying there was no dissent on these programs when there were numerous meetings to that effect that the Attorney General was present for. The White House’ position seems to be that not all of their activities were controversial and therefore Alberto Gonzales statements were not a conscious lie but perhaps a confusion about which programs the Congress was referring to.

But here’s a question: If Congress did not know about these other programs, why would the Attorney Generals assume they were asking him questions abou a classified program nobody else but he knows about? It seems reasonable they were referring to the publically debated topic of the TSP, or domestic wiretapping.